New or renovated Lowell High to cost at least $336 million

LOWELL -- The soil has been bored, the walls have been tested. Experts have calculated the impacts on everything from traffic congestion to energy consumption, they've ensured no endangered bats will be put at risk, and each step of construction has been plotted out and priced.

As of Friday afternoon, all the information -- 127 pages of it -- that city councilors need to make their decision about where and how to build the new high school is in.

The prices for the four remaining options have risen slightly since the designs were originally presented to the city, and all of them come in at more than $335 million, according to the report from Skanska, the project manager, and Perkins Eastman, the architect.

A high school at Cawley Stadium would cost between $336 million, for a five-story building, and $339 million, for a four story building. The reimbursement amount is different at Cawley than it is for renovations downtown, so the two school options there come in at the highest cost to the city: $149 million and $152 million, respectively.

The Cawley options would also cost an additional $6.2 million, according to city estimates, to pay for sidewalks, traffic improvements, replication of the fields that would be razed, and repayment of previous state-funded improvements to the current school. In addition to those one-time costs, the Cawley schools would require at least $3.2 million annually to pay for busing students to the site.

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The most expensive overall project is what is known as Option Three: a renovation and addition to the current school that includes the acquisition of an adjacent office building. The price tag for that option is $352 million, but after reimbursements from the state, the city's share is estimated at $143 million.

Option Two, a renovation and addition to the downtown school on the current footprint, would cost $343 million overall and $135 million to the city.

A renovation to the existing buildings, with no new construction, would cost $343 million, $130 million of which would be charged to Lowell.

The downtown high school options would not require any infrastructure improvements that the city would not need to perform otherwise, although upgrades slated for several downtown intersections will cost the city around $400,000.

A Cawley Stadium school could be built in three years with no disruption to students at the current school, according to Skanska and Perkins Eastman.

Option Three would require 4 1/2 years of construction. While no modular classrooms or temporary gym facilities would be necessary, renovations to the current buildings would require some classes to be moved within the school. The first 1 1/2 years of construction would take place on the adjacent, newly acquired property, and would not affect school operations.

Construction for Option Two would take four years and require temporary gym facilities, and a full renovation would take five years and require both temporary gym facilities and modular classrooms.

If the high school were located at Cawley Stadium, the current building could provide a variety of opportunities, according to a report from the Department of Planning and Development.

The property encompasses roughly 1,000,000 square-feet of buildable space, and DPD has theorized that it could serve a variety of purposes, including housing, mixed-use development, expansion opportunities for UMass Lowell that wouldn't impact the tax base, or space to build a new public safety complex.

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